Hostage Lands

1

DEAD WORDS

Of arms and the man I sing,” intoned the
teacher, red blotches of exhilaration glowing
on her cheeks. She lifted her half-closed
eyes to the blackened timbers of the classroom ceiling and
continued. “That is to say, ‘Arma virumque cano.’ ”

“Arms? Like, well, arms?” said a girl, her nose crinkled
in bewilderment as she looked from her copy of Virgil to
her own arms.

“Weapons, Sally, dear,” said the teacher, Miss Klitsa,
blinking rapidly, her bony knuckles turning white as she
steadied herself with a grip on her lectern. “Swords,
spears, catapults—you know, the tools of warfare. Now
then, if I may recommence. ‘Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam
fato . . .’ ”

“Hey, I’m getting it. I’m really getting it!” said Sally.

“That’d be something about a fat Italian, right?”

Snorts of laughter erupted throughout the classroom.

Miss Klitsa blanched, as if someone had slapped her.
Her eyes fluttering at the class over her half-rimmed
glasses, she blew her nose and began again.

Neil Perkins watched every gesture of the recitation
from his desk at the north corner of the classroom. He
always sat in the back, in the north corner, because through
the leaded panes of a window he had a pretty good view
of a stretch of moorland and sky—and of the wall. All
things he’d seen before, too many times, but for daydreaming
there was simply no better seat in the classroom.
Miss Klitsa’s recitation continued, “. . . multa quoque . . .”

Neil rolled his eyes with embarrassment as the teacher’s
voice rose and fell, one hand clenched in anguish over her
heart, the bony fingers of the other splayed with twitching
fervor, changing gestures from hand to hand as she
spoke. He frequently asked himself at times like these: Why
did Haltwhistle Grammar School, crammed up against an
old pile of rocks in the north of England, why did the students
from this hole-in-the-wall place have to have a teacher
like Miss Klitsa?

Miss Klitsa was not normal. What else was a boy of fifteen
to conclude about a sixty-something-year-old spinster
with hair so red it made your eyes go bloodshot looking
at it? Worse yet, the curly mass seemed to spew from
her head like molten lava from a volcano. Come to think
of it, she would have made a great physical science teacher,
thought Neil, a living, fire-regurgitating specimen right in
the classroom. Or maybe she should have taught ancient
history. What could be better than a flesh-and-blood, walking,
sneezing fossil for your ancient history teacher?

Which brings up the matter of her nose. Neil’s mother
had tried to explain about chronic sinus difficulties and
postnasal drip, but never to the effect of producing in her
son an ounce of sympathy for the poor woman’s condition.
Finding a way to steal yet another of Miss Klitsa’s lacy pink
handkerchiefs, which she habitually stuffed under her watchband between blowings, was a daily task that Neil
assumed with disciplined regularity. Good days he succeeded.
Bad days he failed. To date, his collection of pink
hankies numbered thirty-four. Thirty-four good days out
of forty-five days of school, he had to admit, was decidedly
above average.

And there were other things about Miss Klitsa, like her
tricycle. Neil found it difficult in the extreme to take seriously
a teacher who pedaled a giant-sized tricycle, its pink
paint chalky with age, its ancient basket huge enough to
haul large dressed stones or a month’s supply of coal. Every
morning, every evening, in nearly all weathers, Miss Klitsa
hiked up her skirts and hoisted herself into the driver’s seat
of that rattletrap piece of junk. She sometimes even rode
in the rain, pedaling along with an unfurled umbrella. The
thing was so old that Neil imagined that Iron Age Celts
probably rode tricycles like Miss Klitsa’s. Maybe they’d
found some buried in the peat at the digs in Vindolanda.
He’d have to ask about it.

Miss Klitsa’s voice had switched back to English. She
often broke in to explain something she thought was interesting—
she thought was interesting, though Neil rarely
did. “Some say Virgil wrote on papyrus, but he might just
as well have written on thin wooden tablets, such as this,”
she said, holding up what looked like a flat sheet of wood
a bit smaller than a sheet of paper. “Then dipping a stylus
in ink, such as this—” She held up a tapered bronze penlike
thing. “He would set down his incomparable verse,
which we now resume reading, ‘. . . hic illius arma . . .’ ”

Neil turned from the window and looked hard at the
teacher. Odd as she was in nearly every other way, he
mused, it was her interest—no, no, interest would not do—
her obsession with Roman stuff, like tablets and that stylus,
that made her the oddest. Of course there was the language—
she was, after all, a Latin teacher. But she was
obsessed. It was as if she came under its power. Neil watched her closely. Here it comes, he thought: that ecstatic
gazing past the students in her classroom, that transported
tone in her voice, that relaxed wonder that caused her
cheeks to sag. She’s gone, said Neil to himself. It’s two thousand
years ago, and she’s in Rome. He sighed and turned
back to his window and to the wall. Or she’s marching
around up there.

Suddenly, he felt a lurching coming from his insides. He
often got these overwhelming urges to break out laughing.
He could just see Miss Klitsa, her hair groping in the breeze
from under her helmet, marching along in lobsterback
armor and one of those skimpy red kilt things Roman
legionaries used to wear—her knobby knees—oh, and a
polka-dotted leopard skin over her bony shoulders. Clamping
his fingers over his lips and nose, desperate to smother
the laughter, he felt like his eyes might pop out with the
pressure.

Though the ridiculous old woman often had this effect
on him, Neil did find himself at other times—times of
extreme weakness—temporarily arrested by her passion
for all things Roman. She would raise a bony fist, throw
back her head with a shake that made her hair waggle
wildly, then sniffle convulsively, and shout, “Strength and
honor!” Though for the most part he couldn’t help thinking
of Miss Klitsa as stark-staring, foaming-at-the-mouth,
certifiably bonkers, he had to give the old girl this much:
she had enthusiasm.

Miss Klitsa paused in her recitation of Virgil and began
describing an ancient battle waged on nearby Hadrian’s
Wall, painted Caledonians charging madly into the disciplined
ranks of a Roman legion. And Neil found himself,
firmly against his will, transported with her. What am I
doing? he thought, with an irritated shake of his head. The
fit passed, and he resumed thinking of Miss Klitsa as, well,
Miss Klitsa—demented, certifiable, and as obsolete as an
old Roman sandal. He turned again to his window.

Neil studied the sharp outline of the ancient stone wall
undulating atop the ridge. Of course he didn’t share Miss
Klitsa’s mania for all things Roman; he figured she hadn’t
had a real rival in that department since sometime before
A.D. 476. But he had to admit, there were times when he
wondered about who laid those stones and what they were
thinking as they did it, or about the great battles Miss
Klitsa described, waged right here. He could almost hear
one: the clash of swords and shields, the hail of arrows
and spears, the thunder of hooves from the cavalry, the
cries of anguish and terror, the spilled blood—right there,
on those stones. That was all pretty interesting. Again, Miss
Klitsa’s voice drifted into his thoughts, babbling away in
Latin now. He’d had more than enough for today, and suddenly
he had an idea.

He raised his hand. “Magistra, magistra,” he said, using
the Latin name for teacher that he knew would arrest Miss
Klitsa from her reverie. He’d used it before.

“Neilus, discipulus,” she said with a smile.

Pasting on his most earnest languishing-after-knowledge
gaze, he asked, “Did I understand you to say once that
someone has already translated Virgil?”

“Indeed,” she replied. “Many have exerted their prodigious
talents in the most worthy endeavor of translating
his magisterial works.”

“Allow me to translate,” whispered Neil’s friend John,
hunkered behind his notebook in the next desk. “That’s
Klitsa-speak for yes.”

Ignoring his friend, Neil wracked his brain for a suitable
reply to Miss Klitsa. “Astonishing,” he said.

“Moreover, one is safe in asserting,” she continued, the
bony fingers of her hands steepled in contemplation, “that
all the known classics of the Roman world, Julius Caesar,
Virgil, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, all have made their way—at times a halting way—nevertheless, they have made their
way into—” here she broke off with a frown, her hands fell
limp at her sides, and her voice flattened to a monotone,
“—into modern English.”

“All of them?” asked Neil.

“Indeed,” replied Miss Klitsa.

John leaned closer. “Now for the kill, mate,” he whispered,
his lips not moving.

“Yet you still teach us Latin,” observed Neil.

“Naturally,” she replied, recoiling as if to do otherwise
was akin to withholding the benefits of good hygiene from
her students.

“If you will forgive me for pointing out,” he continued,
“the non sequitur.”

“Non sequitur?” she replied. “I do not follow you.”

“Perhaps I am not making myself very clear,” Neil continued.
“Allow me to frame my question using another language—
like, English. Does anyone actually speak Latin
today, I mean, when they go to the shop—or to the pub?”

“Getis meum unam beerum,” said John, under his
breath.

More titters from the class.

“ ’Tis a great loss to civilization,” began Miss Klitsa, with
a sniff. “But, alas, I am compelled to reply that no people
group today speak in the lofty strains of antiquity. ’Tis an
incalculable loss.”

Miss Klitsa narrowed her eyes at him, yanked her handkerchief
from under her watchband with a snap, and made
three delicate blasts on her nose.

“You shall hear me say many things, Neil,” she replied,
stuffing the handkerchief back in its place. “But you shall
never hear me say that.”

“But does the question not inevitably follow, magistra,
that if everything worth reading is already translated into English, what possible good can come,” he continued,
“from any of us learning Latin?”

Miss Klitsa’s face took on a color dangerously close to
that of her hair.

“Nuances, Neil Perkins,” she said, bony knuckles white
as she gripped her lectern and leaned closer, her eyes snapping.
“The devil is always in the details, and the meaning
is always in the nuances. Never forget that.”

“Never,” he replied with feeling. Then added as an afterthought
another, “Never,” calculating that a double negative
of a negative imperative might actually be saying that
he would never remember what she had just told him never
to forget.

Drawing in a deep breath, Miss Klitsa clasped her hands
together and gazed at the ceiling. “Now then, with Virgil,
we continue. ‘. . . altae moenia Romae.’ ”

“Now, what’s the rest say?” asked Sally, her face
scrunched in bewilderment at the page.

“ ‘The lofty walls,’ ” said Miss Klitsa, “and yes, dear, ‘of
Rome.’ ”

“See. I really do get it,” said Sally, giggling.

Neil stole a glance out the window at the wall, black
clouds gathering above.

“Precisely, Neil,” said Miss Klitsa, following his gaze.
She fixed her eyes on Neil over her half-rimmed glasses.

“Our wall looms in our minds, does it not? Our wall, we
say, but by rights it is Hadrian’s, really. And as familiarity
so often engenders contempt, so we think little of it. Few
of you appreciate the overwhelming privilege of living in
the stupendous shadow of this ‘lofty wall of Rome.’ If those
stones could only speak; if each mile castle would but give
up her dead.”

“Yikes!” said Sally, burying her eyes in the back of her
hand and squirming in her seat.

“To you all this is but common,” continued Miss Klitsa.
“Today your fathers’ sheep graze on turf that received the
tread of legions, the blood of Celts, the imprint of an
emperor’s heel. But, oh, if you would hear the wall speak,
how differently would you view those ancient stones, how
lofty would they then appear to you.”

“The stones talk?” said Sally, scrunching up her nose
more than usual. “Like, for real?”

Neil looked again at the wall. He’d grown up thinking
of it as nothing more than a big pile of rocks, the southern
boundary of his father’s farm, a source of stones to
repair the barn, a narrow highway to balance his all-terrain
vehicle on while searching for a runaway ewe.

Miss Klitsa lowered her voice ominously. “Hear me, students.
Each new artifact uncovered, each sandal and spearhead,
each coin and sword hilt, I say, each one does speak!
Still more, the letters, the diaries, the dispatches! Oh, make
no mistake, my students, if we but had ears to hear, eyes
to see what lies beneath our feet the wonders of antiquity
would be exposed, the mysteries of the ancients revealed,
and the dead made alive.”

“Dead people made alive?” said Sally, her eyes screwed
shut. “Oh, please, don’t. Not for real?”

“Yes, Sally.” Miss Klitsa leaned forward and stared hard
from face to face at the class, her eyes flashing. Reddened
from blowing, her nostrils flared as she drew breath in
short pulls and exhaled in shallow wheezes. “For real.”

Neil was sitting up. She means it, he thought, narrowing
his eyes at the teacher.

“And when those once-dead voices come to life and
speak,” she continued, her voice teetering on the verge of
hysteria, her wide eyes darting from face to face around
the classroom. “They will speak—” her eyes locked and
seemed to bore in on Neil, “—in Latin!”